How the pedestrians correlate their choices in walkway routes with surrounding built environments? An appraisal based on multi-criteriadecision- making modelling

Walking built environment and route choice process is a multifaceted phenomenon relating to thelevel of pedestrians' satisfaction. In addition to walking routes' physical dimension, variousparameters such as the beliefs, the comfort, and safety of the path, etc., influence the walking. Wepropose a new method based on a multi-criteria-decision-making (MCDM) approach with simpleadditive weighting (SAW) to model the effect of such parameters. For the verification of the SAWmodel, we performed field studies, and pedestrians completed some questionnaires. The areainvolved in our study is in the central district of Tabriz city. The presented method can be used fora realistic appraisal of several walking paths to make an appropriate decision concerning the costand time constraints. The obtained results show that access to the public transportation, theexistence of bothersome usage, the service level of sidewalks, the useful width of sidewalks andthe safety of a cross-pass account for ۷۸% of the sufficient weight. Results illustrate the impact ofindices on the pedestrians' satisfaction are not equivalent. We can use this method for a realisticassessment of the pedestrians' environment to present an efficient design and to improve walkingroutes concerning the cost and time constraints.